For years, the telecommunications, banking and payment processing industries have been trying to engineer a mobile transaction processing technology (predominantly for point of sale mobile transactions) that is secure, efficient and easy to use. Their inability to do so has effectively relegated the mobile transaction market to predominantly the purchase of downloadable items such as ringtones and music.
In addition, consumers' concerns over the security of mobile payment systems have hindered the widespread adoption of such technology. In traditional credit card or debit card based Point of Sale systems, when a consumer makes a purchase, the consumer's sensitive payment account information is generally processed between a merchant's POS Terminal and a Payment Platform (such as that of a credit card company, bank or other financial institution). Further, the consumer is typically required to enter personal identification numbers (“PINs”), or other such verification information such as passwords, on the merchant's POS Terminal. While such technology is widely adopted, in the case of mobile payment systems in particular, there remains a need to provide for enhanced security by removing much of such payment processing functions away from the merchant POS Terminal.
In particular, providing one entity with some control in how their personal financial information is provided to directly another entity (e.g. between consumer and merchant) involved in the funds transfer has so far been elusive. This inability to involve more entity control of the funds transfer between entities while at the same time streamlining the amount of time and information entities must share with each other during funds transfer has effectively relegated experience in online electronic direct funds transfer to that of yesterday rather than the future. In particular, international money remittance is disconnected from the customer shopping experience, as well as the ability for greater control of an account holder over sharing of their financial account is simply not available in mobile device-enabled shopping environments. Today's money remittance/transfer process is considered inefficient as a person must know in advance when and how much funds they require (and wait to have the funds transfer effected) before the person can use the transferred money to personally purchase goods and/or services. This remittance/transfer process becomes increasingly more complex, costly, and time-wise inefficient when the transfer is international in nature, thereby requiring communication between multiple banking systems and/or multiple currencies.
At the same time, developments in the field of mobile commerce are being facilitated by improved functionality and features available on mobile devices, and by such functionality and features becoming more commonplace on current mobile devices. For example, cell phones, smart phones and tablet computers nowadays are commonly integrated, multi-functional devices. In addition to their core, basic functionality, they will often have, or can be configured to have, web-enabled functionality, various other network communication capabilities (e.g., e-mail, text, Wi-Fi, etc.), camera functions, scanning and graphical image handling functionalities, communication in real time with point of sale (POS) and/or backend systems (e.g. financial transaction processing systems, purchase transaction processing systems, merchant retail systems, etc.) connected with retail purchase, and other capabilities. Further, the ability of mobile devices to record and process images directly has not been fully leveraged by current state of the art transaction payment systems. Further, the ability of images to contain encoded information also has not been fully leveraged by current state of the art transaction payment systems.